Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.

Headline: After Catalans, Italian regions step up autonomy call

Sub-headline:Northern League uses Lombardy and Veneto referendums to push for special status

Its not just the European Project that is under threat from the dreaded Populist Monster , but the Nation State, the very foundation of Monnet’s Coal and Steel cartel, that suffers from the pretensions of Democracy, as it has evolved. First the long historical evolution of Catalan, and now the lukewarm votes in Lombardy and Veneto for ‘more autonomy’, approved by the Italian Constitutional Court.

This ambiguous position is reflected in Sunday’s referendums, which are consultative and non-binding. They are carefully phrased to ask voters if they want more “autonomy” without threatening “national unity”. Unlike the Catalan vote they have been approved by the Italian constitutional court.

As informative as this news story by Rachel Sanderson is, as to the political actors in the Italian politics of the present, should the reader look to Daniel T. Rogers’ book ‘Age of Fracture‘, written in an American political/historical/economic context, for a telling simile/metaphor for the evolving European crisis? That describes both the EU and the Nation State, caught in the rip tide of history, exacerbated by the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Dispensation?